TV Recaps

I’ve been cattily picking at Murderbot ever since it debuted, but in Episode 6, I felt like it was finally learning its lesson.

I caught myself thinking during Episode 4 that Stick has made a pretty fundamental miscalculation.

Let’s be frank – we’ve pretty much known since the beginning that Tastefully Yours is going to have a predictable, happy ending.

You know what The Walking Dead: Dead City needed to rejuvenate a flagging Season 2? Spoiler alert: It wasn't a one-eyed CGI bear.

Thus far, Murderbot has done a pretty good job of balancing its comedy with its drama. But it’s always a fine line.

It’s impossible to talk about Stick without mentioning Ted Lasso, since the rubric for beloved sports comedies was defined by AFC Richmond’s adventures on Apple TV+.

The great measure of how much we like the characters in the shows we watch is how we respond to them being legitimately heartbroken, and that’s the territory that Tastefully Yours finally ventures into in Episode 8.

I wasn’t keen on Tastefully Yours across its last couple of episodes, which seemed to miss the point of the show’s breezy small-town charm a little bit.

With Episode 5, Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Dead City reaches a clear turning point.

Murderbot still has the usual problems in Episode 4, namely being too rushed and clipped for its own good, but “Escape Velocity Protocol” brings everything together well despite those quibbles.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tastefully Yours has reached the stage of any self-respecting romantic K-Drama where the giggly first-date awkwardness permeates the whole thing, which is coming a little earlier than expected after the ending of the previous episode.

There’s a kernel of a good idea in Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Dead City, but the chances of the show committing to it are so slim as to be virtually non-existent.

The games are very much afoot in MobLand, and it’s beginning to seem like Harry holds many more cards than he has let on.

I’ve identified a key issue in Murderbot. To be fair, I mentioned it in my recap of the two-part premiere, and nothing has changed; it’s just twice as noticeable because Episode 3 is obviously half as long.

"How Did We Become These People?" is, like the previous episode of Your Friends & Neighbors, something of a slow chapter.

Tastefully Yours is still in that early team-building stage, as evidenced by Episode 4, which uses the tried and tested technique of a bit of competition to solidify the core dynamics.

As much as I’ll always relish the opportunity for food puns, I should start taking Tastefully Yours a bit more seriously since, as of Episode 3, it’s really starting to cohere.

There’s probably a case to be made that nine episodes into a 12-episode season is too late for a show to get good. But this is also likely underselling Heavenly Ever After, which has always been “good”, so to speak, and has mostly just failed to progress beyond that.